Vintage Embroidery CD Case

The girls have recently discovered a renewed love of CDs. They've both always loved listening to their choice of music in the car, or occasionally an audio book; but not since Nursery Rhyme days have they particularly wanted to play CDs at home. At the moment though, they are regularly alternating, mainly up in their bedrooms, between ballet music, Disney songs and girly pop CDs, with the occasional audio book thrown in still too. And there are very frequent night time 'concerts' performed whilst dancing on the bed. Unfortunately, they are still just as bad now at putting CDs away in their cases as they were back in Nursery Rhyme loving days, and said cases never seem to be in the place they're sure they left them.

I spotted an idea for a CD holder in this book, which seemed like a perfect way to get over the missing case problem and encourage them to keep their CDs safe.

As you can see the idea in the book is to use tea towels for the project, but embroidered linens seemed like an excellent alternative to me, and another good way to continue reducing my stock pile. There are some interesting and pretty ideas in this book, but personally I find the instructions impossible to follow - but you know me and instructions, so it quite possibly is just a 'personal' thing! But it did mean that I just used the idea and did my own thing with the actual making.

Slight lack of photos along the way, since most of the making for this was done when Sam was off on his travels with my camera. And I'm sure I didn't come up with the slickest or neatest way of making it either. So I'm not going to go through it step by step, but will try and explain the basic construction idea, and if you are interested in making one for yourself and it doesn't make sense to you then please shout and I'll try and be more specific.

I started out making a 3 layered piece, with some old wool blanket in the middle to give it a little sturdiness and a piece of old flannel sheet on the reverse. These layers were just sewn right sides together along 3 sides and then turned out before neatly ironing under and sewing the last side. I also added the lace 'tie' and the words - which just sum up the girls use of their CDs right now!

The 'wallets' for the CDs are all napkins, 2 trimmed down to the size I wanted and then sewn together and folded up on themselves to create the wallet. I machine sewed down the middle, to split each into 2 CD compartments, before sewing them into the base of the holder, sewing just down each side. I started with the top row of wallets and worked my way down, overlapping as I went. After each wallet row was sewn in, I added a few hand stitches at the bottom, in the middle seam, just to anchor the middle to the base. If you don't mind a line of machine stitching showing up on the front of your holder, you could just machine sew along the bottom of each wallet section. (Or you could plan ahead more meticulously than me and create your inside section in full before sewing your 3 fabric layers together in the first place!)

So with this design, each of the CD wallets are 'loose' within the holder.

It may be pure novelty factor which will wear off in the near future, but I'm happy to report that, at the moment, the girls are both using the holder and I'm not coming across stray CDs lying out on bookshelves next to CD players any more. The lace tie does keep them reasonably secure in the holder while they're being carried around, but if held upside down (as Maria, in particular, seems to sometimes do) then CDs do fall out of their inner pockets. So I think I will add either buttons and mini ties or velcro to the wallet openings to secure them completely. Possibly having the outer tie running vertically, rather than horizontally, might have worked with this problem too.

I hope that isn't quite as confusing as it maybe sounds to me right now, and that it gives you a good starting point if you do want to make one.

Sally.